Isegoria

John Derbyshire describes the strangest travel book ever written, An African in Greenland:

Kpomassie was raised in one of the deeply conservative tribal societies bordering the Gulf of Guinea. (His tribe, he tells us, was the Watyi.) In the late 1950s, when the story begins, these people were well acquainted with the modern world, but had embraced only its utilitarian aspects. Kpomassie?s father, for example, worked as an electrician, but had five wives. The family scorned Christianity, preferring the ancient animism of their region. After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult. This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain?s book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska. Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties — it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland — he eventually did so.

It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.

He finds the Eskimos boozin’ it up and sleepin’ around — and not living the traditional Eskimo lifestyle:

All these Eskimos were Danish citizens, and enjoyed the benefits of a typically generous Scandinavian welfare state. Nobody in southern Greenland seemed to do much work, and practically nobody was sober after mid-morning.

Derbyshire notes that he’s “one of the last generation of Westerners to have experienced a culture with strong traditional values”:

The things I was taught as a child — the hymns and songs and poems, the Latin and geometry and grammar, the street games and rhymes and customs, respect for the Crown, the Church, the Nation, the School, my elders — were much closer to the things my great-grandparents were taught than they are to anything an English child born twenty years after me would have learned.

This example really stood out:

In movie theaters in England in the 1950s, the National Anthem was always played at the end of the movie. Everybody stood up and stayed at attention out of respect to the Monarch until the anthem was over.

Things have changed.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick, writer Karey KirkPatrick interviews himself about the new movie that recently started filming:

So we’re six weeks into filming HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and the powers that be (PTB) thought it would be a good idea to kick it off with an interview with me, the screenwriter, since that is, after all, where this incarnation of the film started.

So I decided to interview myself because a) I think I?ll be harder on myself and know what sort of questions an interviewer might ask and b) no one has asked to interview me.

And why should they? Who am I? “Not Douglas Adams” is the answer that concerns most people. So with this in mind let?s proceed.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

When I read the headline, Mortensen to Speak at Event in Denmark, I had to ask, Does Aragorn speak Danish?:

Viggo Mortensen, who played King Aragorn in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, will be the main speaker at Denmark’s annual Fourth of July celebration.

Mortensen, whose father emigrated to the United States, will speak at the annual Rebild festival in northern Denmark — billed as the biggest Fourth of July party outside of the United States.

Born in New York City, Mortensen spent several summers in Denmark as a teenager and speaks some Danish.

“All Danes consider him to be nearly Danish,” the organizers said in a statement Monday.

Mortensen will be joined by Etta Cameron, an 84-year-old American-born gospel and jazz singer who lives in the capital, Copenhagen.

Danes and descendants of emigrants have celebrated the U.S. Independence Day with barbecues, square dancing and country music outside Rebild, a village 155 miles northwest of Copenhagen, since 1912.

Despite the fact that it was a Tarantino homage to kung-fu flicks and samurai films, I didn’t enjoy Kill Bill; I didn’t even go to see the sequel. Kill Bill… Or Else! interviews Tarantino — and reminds me of his “genius”:

Is there any movie around you wish you’d made?

If I had done the opening 10 minutes and opening credits of the Dawn of the Dead remake, I’d be very proud. And believe me, I was against remaking George Romero — that was sacrilege. I don’t think I would have the mania to make The Passion of the Christ, but I’d be proud of the results. Those are the only things playing around right now that are terrific.

So you saw The Passion of the Christ?

I loved it. I’ll tell you why. I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I’ve seen since the talkies — as far as telling a story via pictures. So much so that when I was watching this movie, I turned to a friend and said, “This is such a Herculean leap of Mel Gibson’s talent. I think divine intervention might be part of it.” I cannot believe that Mel Gibson directed it. Not personally Mel Gibson — I mean, Braveheart was great. I mean, I can’t believe any actor made that movie. This is like the most visual movie by an actor since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter. No, this is 15 times more visual than that. It has the power of a silent movie.

(Hat tip to iSteve.)

I don’t know the first thing about piano, but The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent amused me:

Vladimir Horowitz once observed that there were three kinds of pianists — Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists and bad pianists. Over the years Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has sometimes been thought to belong in all three categories. His father, a prosperous Canadian furrier, changed the family name from Gold to Gould; many admirers have assumed that the reclusive musician — hypersensitive, fussy, and in his youth almost effeminately pretty — must have been a closeted gay; and at one time or another nearly all his recordings have been derided as perverse in tempo, willfully disdainful of the composer’s intentions, and marred or ruined by Gould’s quite noticeable humming. To this day, that Bible of classical music, the Penguin Guide, seldom bestows more than two stars on Glenn Gould CDs and nearly always points out that his renditions of, say, Beethoven’s late sonatas will appeal only to committed fans. One can tell that the Penguin critics privately regard such fans as essentially insane cultists.

In fact, as musicologist Kevin Bazzana shows in this authoritative, beautifully composed biography, Gould was English-Irish and not at all Jewish, enjoyed several heterosexual love affairs (one quite serious, with a married woman), and was judged by Sviatoslav Richter — arguably the greatest all-round pianist of the latter half of the 20th century — as nothing less than a genius of the keyboard.